Citizen-science initiatives in which members of the public contribute to a particular study have become a very valuable asset to researchers.
UC San Diego professor Rob Knight (right), who has dual appointments in Pediatrics as well as Computer Science and Engineering, co-founded the American Gut project, a crowdsourced, crowdfunded initiative in which anyone can contribute mouth, skin or gut samples from themselves, family members, even dogs -- all for microbiome sequencing. "The biggest value of this kind of citizen-science initiative is that only with thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people might we get a full range of microbes and what range of microbiomes are out there," said Knight in a March 6 feature broadcast over WBBM Radio in Chicago. "In particular, what's fascinating about this study... is that we are finding all kinds of configurations of the microbiome out there in healthy people and in people with various diseases, that we would have had no idea existed. So were are getting this tremendously expanded view of what kinds of microbiomes are out there."
Knight will also appear in the April 2016 edition of "Computing Primetime" on UCSD-TV, in a conversation with fellow CSE Prof. Larry Smarr on "decoding the microbiome".